Food for Thought

When sourcing your fresh food from a retailer, the distance that your food has travelled to you can be difficult to know. This information is a part of its food-print and good to know when you purchase a product.

Large multinational supermarkets often only label the country of origin on fresh produce. For example, you may find that your strawberries or mango’s might say which state in Australia they are grown, but this tends to be specific to particular fruits or vegetables.

A typical supermarket will provide similar veggies all year round, even outside of their local growing season. This is because they can source them from different regions within Australia and import them from other countries. You might see that your garlic has come from China.

How far has your food travelled?

Australia imports about 10% of all its fresh food, however considering the size of the country this still means that food must travel vast distances. If for example, you buy oranges imported from the USA or California, that fruit has travelled over 12000km to get to you.

Published by alexiamaddox

I am a digital sociologist who is deeply curious about how innovations in digital networked technologies become adopted and socially adapted. Our lives have been irrevocably impacted by the advent of the internet. This includes the ways we communicate, how we learn and find information alongside how we create and exchange things that have value to us.
Having watched the spread and adoption of the internet and studied its social impacts, I know that our relationship with innovations in digital networked technologies creates both intended and unintended consequences. Our early and unprocessed reactions are more visible in the real time pulse of social media. Our lives are archived and our online activities create digital traces that reveal more about us and challenge our understandings of privacy and consent. Without a clear intention or direction, we are engineering our future through our mundane daily practices and I think it is important for us to stop and consider what we want our digital future to be.
As a practicing sociologist, my research interests are in digital frontiers, community studies and research methods. This is covered in my recent book, ‘Research Methods and Global Online Communities: a case study’ which combines these areas and forms the basis of my study of emerging communities forming through online spaces and cryptography.
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